Quote

Self-reflection is a desire felt by the body, as well as the soul. As dancers, healers, and saints all know, when you turn your attention toward even the simplest physical process - breath, the small movements of the eyes, the turning of a foot in midair - what might have seemed dull matter suddenly awakens.

Susan Griffin

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Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Self
Process
Feet
Breaths
Saints
Even
Felt
Turn
Saint
Movements
Body
Small
Suddenly
Simplest
Soul
Eyes
Reflection
Dancer
Midair
Wells
Attention
Seemed
Foot
Healers
Might
Turns
Physical
Turning
Awakens
Well
Eye
Toward
Dull
Healer
Matter
Desire
Movement
Breath
Dancers

More quotes by Susan Griffin

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Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.
Susan Griffin
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I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.
Susan Griffin
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Waging war is not a primary physical need.
Susan Griffin
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War starts in the mind, not in the body.
Susan Griffin
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The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
Susan Griffin
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Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
Susan Griffin
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Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.
Susan Griffin
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Yes we are devilish that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.
Susan Griffin
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Society, like nature, is one body, really.
Susan Griffin
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Each life reverberates in every other life. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are connected, woven together in our needs and desires, rich and poor, men and women alike.
Susan Griffin
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Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
Susan Griffin
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At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.
Susan Griffin
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Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.
Susan Griffin
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Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.
Susan Griffin
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Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.
Susan Griffin
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But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
Susan Griffin
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How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.
Susan Griffin
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A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
Susan Griffin
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I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.
Susan Griffin
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I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.
Susan Griffin